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Atlanta History Center

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Atlanta History Center

Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

About

Thirty-three acres in Buckhead hold a museum, woodland trails, and a clutch of restored homes, anchored by the 1928 Swan House and its cascading fountain staircase. The Cyclorama brings you face-to-face with a 49-foot-tall hand-painted panorama of the Battle of Atlanta, restored to its full circular sweep. Between the gardens, the farmhouse, and galleries tracing the city from the Civil War to the 1996 Olympics, an afternoon here doubles as a walk through Atlanta itself.

Highlights

Getting there

130 West Paces Ferry Road NW, Atlanta, GA 30305

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Fox Theatre Attractions

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Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

This 1929 movie palace on Peachtree Street began as a Shrine temple, which is why its auditorium unfolds like an open-air Arabian courtyard beneath a ceiling of 96 crystal stars and clouds that drift across a painted night sky. Mighty Mo, the original Moller pipe organ with more than 3,600 pipes, still rises from the pit before Broadway tours and concerts. Take the backstage tour to see the Egyptian Ballroom and the Moorish detail up close, then catch a show under those flickering stars.

National Center for Civil and Human Rights Attractions

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Atlanta, GA · Metro Atlanta

Phil Freelon designed this downtown museum so its curved walls fold toward each other like clasped hands, and the experience inside earns that gesture. You can sit at a 1960s lunch-counter simulation with headphones that pipe in the jeers and threats sit-in protesters endured, then walk through galleries holding Martin Luther King Jr.'s handwritten sermons and travel documents. The upper floor widens the lens from the American civil rights movement to human rights struggles still unfolding around the world.

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Behind the glass of the Ocean Voyager gallery, whale sharks and manta rays glide through 6.3 million gallons of saltwater, the largest single tank in the country. The Georgia Aquarium sits downtown across from Centennial Olympic Park, where beluga whales, African penguins, and a clear acrylic tunnel put the open ocean overhead as you walk beneath it.

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Curated guides that feature Atlanta History Center.

Georgia Attractions45 places

Georgia Attractions

The Georgia stops worth building a day around. Atlanta's Coca-Cola vault and a whale shark the size of a school bus, the oak-shaded squares of Savannah, a visionary's painted folk-art compound in Buena Vista, FDR's Little White House, and a 56-foot sheet-metal chicken in Marietta. The famous, the historic, and the gloriously strange.